Kurt Waldheim

President of Austria (1986-1992)

• Born: December 21, 1918
• Birthplace: Sankt Andrä-Wördern, Austria
• Died: June 14, 2007
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Following his tenure as an Austrian diplomat, Waldheim served as secretary-general of the United Nations and distinguished himself by organizing massive relief operations. His subsequent election as president of Austria was overshadowed by controversies over his military service during World War II.

Early Life

Kurt Waldheim (VAWLD-him) was born in Sankt Andrä-Wördern, Austria, one of three children of Walter and Josefina Waldheim. Walter he had changed the family name from Watzlawik to Waldheim shortly before his son’s birth was the local schoolmaster and would eventually advance to the position of superintendent of schools for the district of Tulln. Following his graduation from secondary school at Klosterneuburg near Vienna in 1936, Kurt enrolled at the Consular Academy in Vienna to study diplomacy. To fulfill his military obligation, he also enrolled as a one-year volunteer in the Austrian army, where he served in a cavalry unit.

The Waldheims were devout Roman Catholics, and both father and son were active supporters of Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, who, as leader of the Christian Socialist Party, stood for an independent Austria. Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, the Waldheims’ support for Schuschnigg resulted in considerable hardships for Walter, including arrests by the Gestapo. Young Waldheim still had to complete his military training with his original Austrian army unit, which by now had become part of the German army. At the same time, he managed to continue his studies and graduated from the Vienna Consular Academy in the spring of 1939. The question of whether Waldheim was at that time a member of National Socialist organizations such as the National Socialist Students League and an Equestrian Unit of the Sturmabteilung, or SA (storm troopers) did not become an issue until his campaign for the presidency of Austria in the 1980’s.

Between brief stints with his military unit and officer candidate training in Germany, Waldheim managed to attend law lectures at the University of Vienna, where he passed the basic examination in law in March of 1940. In June of 1941, his cavalry unit participated in the German invasion of Russia, where, in December of the same year, he was wounded and sent to Vienna for physical therapy.

In the spring of 1942, Waldheim, now a lieutenant, was returned to active military service with the German 12th Army in the Balkans. Until the end of the war, he served in a number of capacities such as intelligence officer, interpreter, and liaison officer in at least ten different locations in Bosnia, Greece, and Albania, where German and Italian units were involved in partisan warfare and so-called pacification operations. Throughout this period, Waldheim managed to obtain several study leaves that enabled him to complete his doctorate in law at Vienna in April, 1944. That year he married Elisabeth Ritschel, with whom he was to have a son and two daughters. He returned to duty in Greece with Army Group E, which became involved in the deportation of Jews.

Life’s Work

In June of 1946, Waldheim was appointed a career member of the Austrian Foreign Service. Pleasant and courteous, he impressed his superiors with his dedication and his abilities. In the years to come he would serve in a variety of positions, including first secretary of the Austrian embassy in Paris (1948-1951), chief of the personnel division in the Austrian Foreign Ministry (1951-1955), and Austrian ambassador to Canada (1958-1960). Beginning in 1964, Waldheim served for four years as Austria’s permanent representative to the United Nations and subsequently for two years as minister of foreign affairs.

After leaving government service, Waldheim was named chair of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and chair of the Safeguards Committee of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1971, he was narrowly defeated in his campaign for the presidency of Austria. In the same year, he was appointed the fourth secretary-general of the United Nations for his first five-year term, which began on January 1, 1972. At the time the rival superpowers, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, would only accept as secretary-general someone from a neutral country, such as Austria.

Like U Thant, his predecessor in the office of secretary-general, Waldheim viewed the United Nations as a forum for communication and understood that the effectiveness of his office depended to no small degree on the support of the major powers. At the same time, he enjoyed support from developing-world and nonaligned nations. A diplomat of the old school, he used his office to mediate conflicts and reconcile conflicting opinions that, given the inherently weak position of the secretary-general, required considerable diplomatic skills.

In the course of his ten years as secretary-general, Waldheim became involved in the mediation of numerous conflicts as well as in peacekeeping operations in such places as Cyprus and Yemen. In the early 1970’s he began talks with the South African government and the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) over the future of Namibia. In the late 1970’s he played a major role in the establishment of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFL). He helped singer-composer Paul McCartney to organize a series of music concerts to aid Cambodians with their recovery from the devastating leadership of Pol Pot.

There were also failures, however. Perhaps the most widely publicized was Waldheim’s trip to Tehran, Iran, to bring about the release of American hostages; Iran’s leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, refused to meet with him, and he was threatened by hostile militants. Above all, Waldheim distinguished himself in organizing and implementing massive relief programs in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Although he generally preferred to work behind the scenes, he also voiced his concerns publicly when he appealed on humanitarian grounds for a cessation of U.S. bombing of dikes in North Vietnam.

Additionally, Waldheim arranged for major international conferences. Among them were the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development in Santiago, Chile (1972), the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden (also in 1972), the Third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea in Caracas, Venezuela, the World Food Conference in Bucharest, Hungary, and the World Food Conference in Rome (all in 1974).

Waldheim’s election for an unprecedented third term as secretary-general ran into opposition from the People’s Republic of China, which favored a candidate from a developing nation. At the end of 1981, he retired from his position at the United Nations and was succeeded by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru.

After a brief interlude as a research professor for diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Waldheim again became a candidate for the presidency of Austria in 1986. Even before the electoral campaign was in full swing, however, an article in the Austrian weekly Profil revived old rumors and raised new questions about Waldheim’s alleged membership in Nazi organizations and his wartime service in the Balkans. Waldheim claimed in the English version of his memoirs, In the Eye of the Storm (1986), that after being wounded on the Russian front he had spent the rest of the war in Vienna studying. He continued to deny all allegations, even in the face of some documentary evidence to the contrary, and did not help matters by issuing vague and contradictory statements about his military service. The drawn-out controversy became known as the Waldheim affair.

At the same time, the U.S.-based World Jewish Congress (WJC) took an increasingly aggressive role in the campaign to force Waldheim to reveal the details of his alleged Nazi past and military service during the war. However, other prominent Jews, such as the famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal , criticized the involvement of the WJC and argued that the available evidence was simply not sufficient to label Waldheim a Nazi or a war criminal. Many Austrians reacted angrily to the criticism from abroad as an unwarranted interference in Austria’s internal affairs. The fact that much of the criticism was considered to be coming from the WJC produced an upsurge of nationalism and anti-Semitism in Austria and helped solidify Waldheim’s electoral support. In 1986, he handily won a runoff election against Kurt Steyrer, the candidate for the Socialist Party, and was inaugurated for a six-year term. However, the inaugural ceremonies were accompanied by protest demonstrations, while many European governments withheld the customary congratulations and distanced themselves from the newly elected president.

The turmoil over Waldheim’s wartime activities continued and overshadowed his entire presidency. Under persistent pressure from the WJC, U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese eventually agreed, in 1987, that Waldheim should be placed on the watch list of undesirable “aliens,” thereby denying him entry into the United States as a private person. It was the first time that a U.S. administration declared the leader of a friendly country persona non grata.

In 1988, the specially appointed international Commission of Historians was, on the basis of available evidence, unable to provide a final answer to the question of Waldheim’s involvement in war crimes. However, the commission also noted that he must have been aware of the illegal acts committed in the Balkans and that his own descriptions of his military past were at variance with the established facts. Throughout the affair Waldheim insisted that his military service was honorable and answered his critics primarily by accusing them of attempts to slander Austrians in general. In any case, he remained practically isolated in Austria until his status as a diplomatic pariah was at last broken: On the invitation of Pope John Paul II in 1987, Waldheim made an official visit to the Vatican. He also made official visits to the Middle East and Germany. In 1991, Waldheim announced that he would not run for a second term in 1992. However, the United States never relented, and in a bitter irony it refused to allow him to attend the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in New York.

The Waldheims were lifelong devout Catholics, and in 1994 the Church recognized their contributions. Pope John Paul II named Waldheim a knight in the Order of Pius IX, and his wife received the Holy Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice. Her award came as part of their fiftieth-wedding celebration. Waldheim continued to defend himself from critics, publishing Die Antwort (the answer) in 1996.

On June 14, 2007, at age eighty-eight, Waldheim died from heart failure in a Vienna hospital. A service was held for him in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and he was buried in the Presidential Vault of the Central Cemetery on June 23. Austrian officials at the ceremony (no foreign dignitaries were invited, in accordance with Waldheim’s instructions) complained that he had been unjustly treated by his critics and made to bear the responsibility of a generation of young people simply trying to survive under the Nazi regime. To the contrary, however, on the day following his death, the Austrian Press Agency published a letter written by Waldheim; in it he admitted to having made mistakes and asked for forgiveness.

Significance

Had it not been for the public controversy initiated by Waldheim’s presidential bid, he would, in all likelihood, be remembered as a skillful and effective Austrian diplomat and a competent and relatively efficient, if somewhat colorless, secretary-general of the United Nations. As it turned out, however, his ambition to occupy his country’s highest office brought about an unexpected public scrutiny of his past. Rather than squarely facing the various charges leveled against him, he pursued a course of action marked by a mixture of denials, contradictions, and changing versions of his military record. In many respects, Waldheim’s defensive strategy reflected an attitude held by many of his fellow citizens, who felt that after the Nazi annexation of their country, they had little choice but to go along with the new political reality if they wanted to save their careers.

Increasing media involvement on both sides of the Atlantic, attended by a good measure of irresponsible rhetoric and sensationalist but baseless charges, produced a climate that seemed to rule out rational dialogue. The outbreak of a number of anti-Semitic incidents reminiscent of the Nazi years and of openly anti-Semitic statements by several politicians shocked many Austrians and convinced them to reexamine their nation’s role during World War II.

Bibliography

Bassett, Richard. Waldheim and Austria. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988. This slim volume by a journalist attempts to examine the Waldheim controversy in the broader context of Austria’s recent history. Includes a brief appendix with documents, an index, and photographs.

Finger, Seymour Maxwell, and Arnold A. Saltzman. Bending with the Winds: Kurt Waldheim and the United Nations. New York: Praeger, 1990. Based, in part, on numerous interviews, this brief volume by two former diplomats provides a useful assessment of Waldheim’s tenure at the United Nations. Finger and Saltzman characterize Waldheim as an ambitious and mediocre secretary-general. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Herzstein, Robert Edwin. Waldheim: The Missing Years. New York: Arbor House, 1988. A readable and well-documented account of Waldheim’s activities during the years between 1942 and the end of World War II that exonerates him of direct responsibility for war crimes in the Balkans and sees him as a bureaucratic facilitator. Includes an index, notes on sources, and photographs.

International Commission of Historians. The Waldheim Report. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen and Museum Tusculanum Press, 1993. This report, submitted to the Austrian federal chancellor Franz Vranitzky on February 8, 1988, came without a final answer to the question of Waldheim’s wartime guilt. The report concludes, however, that while Waldheim had no command functions in the Balkans, he must have been aware of the nature of the German reprisals.

Levy, Alan. Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File. Rev. ed. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Part four of this volume offers a lucid and balanced discussion of Waldheim’s career, his denazification, and Wiesenthal’s view of the Waldheim question. Includes an index and photographs.

Mitten, Richard. The Politics of Antisemitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon in Austria. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992. This scholarly and well-documented account of the Waldheim controversy in the context of Austrian politics offers an excellent critical analysis of the charges leveled against Waldheim and examines the arguments advanced by his defenders and his detractors. Extensive, useful notes.

Ryan, James Daniel. The United Nations Under Kurt Waldheim, 1972-1981. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2001. Provides a detailed, accurate account of Waldheim’s United Nations tenure. It discusses his achievements, difficulties dealing with national politicians such as U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger and the United Nation’s slowly diminishing role as the Cold War reintensified. Includes a detailed chronology of events.

Tittmann, Harold H., III. The Waldheim Affair: Democracy Subverted. Dunkirk, N.Y.: Olin Frederick, 2000. Tittmann weighs the evidence for allegations of Waldheim’s participation in Nazi atrocities. He especially examines the role of the media in presenting the evidence. Finding the accusations groundless, he considers the affair as an example of how false perceptions can dupe a free society.

Waldheim, Kurt. In the Eye of the Storm. A Memoir. Bethesda, Md.: Adler & Adler, 1986. Waldheim attempts to explain his objectives and his actions in the course of the various conflicts he experienced during his ten years as secretary-general of the United Nations. Includes an index.